The question in my title implies a premise: that
historically the United States
has well afforded to be a nation of immigrants—indeed, has benefited
handsomely from its good fortune as an immigrant destination. That proposition
was once so deeply embedded in our national mythology as to be axiomatic. More
than a century ago, for example, in the proclamation that made Thanksgiving Day
a national holiday, Abraham Lincoln gave thanks to God for having "largely
augmented our free population by emancipation and by immigration."

Lincoln spoke those words when there were but 34 million Americans and half
a continent remained to be settled. Today, however, the United States is a
nation of some 264 million souls on a continent developed beyond Lincoln's
imagination. It is also a nation experiencing immigration on a scale never
before seen. In the past three decades, since the passage of the Immigration and
Nationality Act Amendments of 1965, the first major revision in
American immigration statutes since the historic closure of immigration in
the 1920s, some 20 million immigrants have entered the United States. To
put those numbers in perspective: prior to 1965 the period of heaviest
immigration to the United States was the quarter century preceding the
First World War, when some 17 million people entered the country—roughly
half the total number of Europeans who migrated to the United States in the
century after 1820 (along with several hundred thousand Asians). The last
pre-war census, in 1910, counted about 13.5 million foreign-born people in
the American population, in contrast to about 22.5 million in 1994.
Historians know a great deal about those earlier immigrants—why they
came, how they ended up, what their impact was on the America of their day.
Whether America's historical experience with immigration provides a useful
guide to thinking about the present case is the principal question I want
to address. I want not only to explore the substantive issue of
immigration but also to test the proposition that the discipline of history
has some value as a way of knowing and thinking about the world.

With respect to immigration itself, I intend to explore two sets of questions:

* Why did people migrate to America in the past, and what were the
consequences, for them and for American society, once they landed?

* Why are people migrating to America today, and what might be the
consequences, for them and for American society, of their presence in such
numbers?

A generation or two ago upbeat answers to the first pair of
questions so pervaded the culture that they cropped up in the most exotic
places—in Tunisia, for example, on July 9, 1943. The occasion was the
eve of the invasion of Sicily, and General George S. Patton
Jr. was addressing his troops, who were about to embark for the battle.
He urged, "When we land, we will meet German and Italian soldiers whom it
is our honor and privilege to attack and destroy. Many of you have in your
veins German and Italian blood, but remember that these ancestors of yours
so loved freedom that they gave up home and country to cross the ocean in
search of liberty. The ancestors of the people we shall kill lacked the
courage to make such a sacrifice and continued as slaves."

In his own inimitable idiom Patton was invoking what for most Americans
was—and still is—the standard explanation of who their immigrant forebears
were, why they left their old countries, and what was their effect on American
society. In this explanation immigrants were the main-chance-seeking and most
energetic, entrepreneurial, and freedom-loving members of their Old World
societies. They were drawn out of Europe by the irresistible magnet of American
opportunity and liberty, and their galvanizing influence on American society
made this country the greatest in the world.

A radically different explanation of immigration has also historically been at
work in the American mind. As the noted social scientist Edward Alsworth Ross
put it in 1914:

Observe immigrants not as they come travel-wan up the gang-plank, nor as they
issue toil-begrimed from pit's mouth or mill-gate, but in their gatherings,
washed, combed, and in their Sunday best. . . . [They] are hirsute, low-browed,
big-faced persons of obviously low mentality. . . . They simply look out of
place in black clothes and stiff collar, since clearly they belong in skins, in
wattled huts at the close of the Great Ice Age. These ox-like men are
descendants of those who always stayed behind.

Ross was describing in these invidious terms what he and his
turn-of-the-century contemporaries called the "new" immigrants—new because
they came predominantly from eastern and southern Europe, as distinct from the
"old," early-and-mid-nineteenth-century immigrants, who had come mainly from
northern and western Europe. Ironically, Ross was also talking about the
parents of those very troops (at least the Italian-American troops) whom Patton
addressed in 1943.

Between those two poles of explanation American views of immigration have
oscillated. On the one hand, as Patton reminds us, immigrants were judged
to be noble souls, tugged by the lodestone of American opportunity, whose
talents and genius and love of liberty account for the magnificent American
character. On the other hand, as in Ross's view, especially if they had
the misfortune to arrive on a more recent boat, immigrants were thought to
be degraded, freeloading louts, a blight on the national character and a
drain on the economy—the kind of people described all too literally, so
the argument goes, by Emma Lazarus's famous inscription on
the base of the Statue
of Liberty: "your tired, your poor . . . the wretched refuse of your
teeming shore."

Yet for all their differences, the two views have several things in common.
Both explain immigration in terms of the moral character of immigrants. Both
understand immigration as a matter of individual choice. And both implicitly
invoke the American magnet as the irresistible force that put people in motion,
drawing them either to opportunity or to dependency.

Those concepts do not bear close analysis as adequate explanations for the
movement of some 35 million human beings over the course of a century. This was
a historical phenomenon too huge and too specific in time to be sufficiently
accounted for by summing 35 million decisions supposedly stimulated by the
suddenly irresistible gravitational attraction of a far-off
continent.

The Push of Europe

For the first three centuries or so after the European discovery of the New
World the principal source of immigrants to the two American continents and the
Caribbean was not Europe but Africa. Only in the early nineteenth century did
the accumulated total of European settlers in the New World exceed the
approximately 10 million Africans who had made the trans-Atlantic voyage in the
years since 1492. To explain the African diaspora by citing entrepreneurial
instincts, the love of democracy, or the freely chosen decisions of migrants to
follow the lodestar of American promise would be a mockery. Clearly, the
involuntary movement of those 10 million Africans is best explained not in
terms of their individual characters and choices but in terms of the
catastrophically disruptive expansion of large-scale plantation agriculture and
its accursed corollary, large-scale commercial slavery.

A comparable—though, to be sure, not identical—element of involuntariness
characterized emigration from nineteenth-century Europe. Any generalization
about what prompted a phenomenon as long-lived and complicated as the great
European migration must, of course, be subject to many qualifications. All
discussions of the migration process recognize both push and pull factors. But
at bottom the evidence convincingly supports the argument that disruption is
essential to the movement of people on such a scale. And, as in the African
case, the best, most comprehensive explanation for a process that eventually
put some 35 million people in motion is to be found in two convulsively
disruptive developments that lay far beyond the control of individual
Europeans. Those developments had their historical dynamic within the context
of European, not American, history.

The first of these needs little elaboration. It was, quite simply, population
growth. In the nineteenth century the population of Europe more than doubled,
from some 200 million to more than 400 million, even after about 70 million
people had left Europe altogether. (Only half of these, it should be noted,
went to the United States—one among many clues that the American-magnet
explanation is inadequate.) That population boom was the indispensable
precondition for Europe to export people on the scale that it did. And the boom
owed little to American stimulus; rather, it was a product of aspects of
European historical evolution, especially improvements in diet, sanitation, and
disease control.

The second development was more complex, but we know it by a familiar name: the
Industrial Revolution.
It includes the closely associated revolution in
agricultural productivity. Wherever it occurred, the Industrial Revolution
shook people loose from traditional ways of life. It made factory workers out
of artisans and, even more dramatically, turned millions of rural farmers into
urban wage-laborers. Most of those migrants from countryside to city, from
agriculture to industry, remained within their country of origin, or at least
within Europe. But in the early stages of industrialization the movement of
people, like the investment of capital during the unbridled early days of
industrialism, was often more than what the market could bear. In time most
European societies reached a kind of equilibrium, absorbing their own workers
into their own wage markets. But in the typical transitional phase some workers
who had left artisanal or agricultural employments could not be reabsorbed
domestically in European cities. They thus migrated overseas.

The large scholarly literature documenting this process might be summarized as
follows: Imagine a map of Europe. Across this map a time line traces the
evolution of the Industrial Revolution. From a point in the British Isles in
the late eighteenth century the line crosses to the Low Countries and Germany
in the early and mid nineteenth century and to eastern and southern Europe in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Across the same map a second
line traces the chronological evolution of migration to the United States. As
it happens, the two lines are almost precisely congruent—migration came
principally from the British Isles in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, then mainly from Germany, and finally from the great watersheds of
the Vistula and the Danube and the mountain ranges of the Apennines and
Carpathians to the south and east.

The congruence of those lines is not coincidental. Industrialization, in this
view, is the root cause and the most powerful single variable explaining the
timing, the scale, the geographic evolution, and the composition of the great
European migration.

For another perspective on the importance of understanding the European
migration from a European point of view, consider the lyrics of a
nineteenth-century Italian folk song called "The Wives of the Americans." In
this case, the "Americans" were men who had gone off to America and left their
wives behind in Italy—specifically, the southern region of Campania. In fact,
men, young men in particular, predominated in the nineteenth-century migratory
stream, and their predominance constitutes a reliable indicator of their
purposes. Many of them never intended to settle permanently elsewhere but hoped
to work abroad for a time and eventually return to the old country.
Repatriation rates for European immigrants averaged nearly 40 percent. Only the
Jews and the Irish did not go home again in significant numbers. For some
later, "new" immigrant groups, especially from the southern Danube regions,
repatriation rates ran as high as 80 percent.

The song describes the wives of the Americans going to church and praying,
"Send money, my husband. Send more money. The money you sent earlier I have
already spent. I spent it on my lover. I spent it with pleasure. Send more
money, you cornuto fottuto [damnable cuckold]." Those lyrics conjure an image
of immigration quite different from the one General Patton urged on his
Italian-American troops in 1943. Together with the figures on repatriation,
they offer a strong corrective to uncritical reliance on the American-magnet
explanation for the past century's European migration.

The Immigrants in America

What happened to European immigrants, and to American society, once they
arrived? Much historical inquiry on this point focuses on immigrant hardship
and on recurrent episodes of nativism, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, and
anti-foreign-radicalism, from the Know-Nothing movement of the 1850s to the
American Protective Association of the late nineteenth century and the revived Ku Klux Klan of the early twentieth century, culminating in the highly
restrictive immigration legislation of the 1920s. Those are important elements
in the history of American immigration, and we would forget them at our peril.
But getting the question right is the most challenging part of any historical
investigation, and there is an analytically richer question to be asked than
Why did immigrants meet sometimes nasty difficulties?

An even more intriguing question is How did tens of millions of newcomers
manage to accommodate themselves to America, and America to them, without more
social disruption? How can we explain this society's relative success—and
success I believe it was—in making space so rapidly for so many people?

The explanation is surely not wise social policy. Beyond minimal monitoring at
the ports of entry, no public policy addressed the condition of immigrants once
they were cleared off Castle
Garden or Ellis Island. But three specific
historical circumstances, taken together, go a long way toward composing an
answer to the question.

First, somewhat surprisingly, for all their numbers, immigrants—even the 17
million who arrived from 1890 to 1914—never made up a very large component of
the already enormous society that was turn-of-the-century America. The census
of 1910 records the highest percentage of foreign-born people ever resident in
the United States: 14.7 percent. Now, 14.7 percent is not a trivial proportion,
but it is a decided minority, and relative to other societies that have
received large numbers of immigrants, a small minority. The comparable figures
in Australia and Canada at approximately the same time were 17 percent and more
than 20 percent, and even higher in Argentina. So here is one circumstance
accounting for the relative lack of social conflict surrounding immigration a
century ago: at any given moment immigrants were a relatively small presence in
the larger society.

A second circumstance was economic. Immigrants supplied the labor that a
growing economy urgently demanded. What is more, economic growth allowed the
accommodation of newcomers without forcing thorny questions of
redistribution—always the occasion for social contest and upheaval. Here, as
so often in American history, especially during the period of heavy immigration
before the First World War, economic growth worked as a pre-emptive solution to
potential social conflict.

The third circumstance was more complicated than sheer numbers or economic
growth. I call this circumstance "pluralism"—by which I mean simply that the
European immigrant stream was remarkably variegated in its cultural, religious,
national, and linguistic origins. These many subcurrents also distributed
themselves over an enormous geographic region—virtually the entire
northeastern quadrant of the United States—and through several political
jurisdictions. By the 1920s immigrants were distributed widely across the great
industrial belt that stretched from New England through New York, New Jersey,
Pennsylvania, and beyond: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and
Minnesota. The states with the most immigrants, not incidentally, also had per
capita incomes higher than the national average—an important fact pertinent to
understanding the relationship between immigration and economic vitality.

The varied composition and broad dispersal of the immigrant stream carried
certain crucial implications, one being that no immigrant group could
realistically aspire to preserve its Old World culture intact for more than a
few generations at best. To be sure, many groups made strenuous efforts to do
just that. Legend to the contrary, last century's immigrants did not cast their
Old World habits and languages overboard before their ship steamed into New
York Harbor. In fact, many groups heroically exerted themselves to sustain
their religions, tongues, and ways of life. The Catholic school system, which
for a generation or two in some American cities educated nearly as many
students as the public school system, eloquently testified to the commitment of
some immigrant communities to resist assimilation. But circumstances weighed
heavily against the success of such efforts. The virtual extinction of the
parochial school system in the past generation—the empty schools and
dilapidated parish buildings that litter the inner cores of the old immigrant
cities—bears mute witness both to the ambition and to the ultimate failure of
those efforts to maintain cultural distinctiveness.

A second and no less important implication of pluralism was that neither any
single immigrant group nor immigrants as a whole could realistically mount any
kind of effective challenge to the existing society's way of doing things. No
single group had sufficient weight in any jurisdiction larger than a
municipality to dictate a new political order. And there was little likelihood
that Polish Jews and Italian Catholics and Orthodox Greeks could find a common
language, much less common ground for political action.

To recapitulate: The most comprehensive explanation of the causes of
immigration a century ago is to be found in the disruptions visited on European
society by population growth and the Industrial Revolution. The United States
was, to use the language of the law, the incidental beneficiary of that
upheaval. The swelling immigrant neighborhoods in turn-of-the-century American
cities were, in effect, by-products of the urbanization of Europe. And once
landed in America, immigrants accommodated themselves to the larger
society—not always easily assimilating, but at least working out a modus
vivendi—without the kinds of conflicts that have afflicted other multinational
societies. That mostly peaceful process of accommodation came about because of
the relatively small numbers of immigrants at any given time, because of the
health of the economy, and because of the constraints on alternatives to
accommodation inherent in the plural and dispersed character of the immigrant
stream.

Having lit this little lamp of historical learning, I would like to carry it
forward and see if it can illuminate the present.

Today's Immigration

The biggest apparent novelty in current immigration is its source, or sources.
Well over half of the immigration of the past thirty years has come from just
seven countries: Mexico, the Philippines, China (I am including Taiwan),
Vietnam, Korea, India, and the Dominican Republic.

Not a single European country is on that list. Here, it would seem, is
something new under the historical sun. Europe has dried up as a source of
immigration and been replaced by new sources in Latin America and Asia.

And yet if we remember what caused the great European migration, the novelty of
the current immigration stream is significantly diminished. Though particular
circumstances vary, most of the countries now sending large numbers of
immigrants to the United States are undergoing the same convulsive demographic
and economic disruptions that made migrants out of so many nineteenth-century
Europeans: population growth and the relatively early stages of their own
industrial revolutions.

Mexico, by far the leading supplier of immigrants to the United States,
conforms precisely to that pattern. Since the Second World War the Mexican
population has more than tripled—a rate of growth that recollects, indeed
exceeds, that of nineteenth-century Europe. And as in Europe a century ago,
population explosion has touched off heavy internal migration, from rural to
urban areas. By some reckonings, Mexico City has become the largest city in the
world, with 20 million inhabitants and an in-migration from the Mexican
countryside estimated at 1,000 people a day.

Also since the Second World War the Mexican economy, despite periodic problems,
has grown at double the average rate of the U.S. economy. Rapid
industrialization has been accompanied by the swift and widespread
commercialization of Mexican agriculture. A Mexican "green revolution," flowing
from improvements in mechanical processing, fertilizers, and insecticides, has
in fact exacerbated the usual disruptions attendant on rapid industrialization:
depopulation of the countryside, urban in-migration, and movement across the
national border. But as in nineteenth-century Europe, most of the movement has
been within Mexico itself. Since 1970 some five million Mexicans have entered
the United States to stay; probably more than 10 million have moved to Mexico
City alone.

Thus we are in the presence of a familiar historical phenomenon, impelled by
developments that are for all practical purposes identical to those that
ignited the great European migration of a century ago.

What Does the Future Hold?

If the causes of present-day immigration are familiar, what will be the
consequences for today's immigrants and tomorrow's America?

I have suggested that three historical circumstances eased the accommodation
between immigrants and the American society of a century ago—the relatively
small number of immigrants present at any given time, the needs and vitality of
the economy, and the plural and distributed character of the immigrant stream.
How do those factors weigh in an analysis of immigration today?

With respect to numbers, the historical comparison gives a basis for confidence
that the answer to our original question—Can we still afford to be a nation of
immigrants?—is yes. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that as of 1994
foreign-born people represented 8.7 percent of the American population, or just
a bit more than half the proportion they made up in the census of 1910.
(Comparable recent numbers for Canada and Australia, incidentally, are
approximately 16 percent and 22 percent.) So, with reference to both American
historical experience and contemporary experience in other countries, the
relative incidence of current immigration to the United States is rather
modest. Surely the United States at the end of the twentieth century is
resourceful enough to deal with an immigrant inflow proportionally half what
American society managed to deal with quite successfully in the early years of
this century.

With reference to the needs and vitality of the economy, the historical
comparison is more complicated. Economic theory suggests that immigration is a
bargain for any receiving society, because it augments the labor supply, one of
the three principal factors of production (along with land and capital),
essentially free of cost. The sending society bears the burden of feeding and
raising a worker to the age when he or she can enter the labor market. If at
that point the person emigrates and finds productive employment elsewhere, the
source society has in effect subsidized the economy of the host society. That
scenario essentially describes the historical American case, in which fresh
supplies of immigrant labor underwrote the nation's phenomenal industrial surge
in the half century after the Civil War.

The theory is subject to many qualifications. Unskilled immigrant workers may
indeed increase gross economic output, as they did from the Pittsburgh blast
furnaces to the Chicago packinghouses a century ago, and as they do today in
garment shops and electronic assembly plants from Los Angeles to Houston. But
as productivity has become more dependent on knowledge and skill, the net value
of unskilled immigrant labor has decreased, a point that informs much of the
current case for restricting immigration. Yet it is important to note that
argument on this point turns on the relative contribution of low-skill workers
to overall output; the theory is still unimpeachable in its insistence on the
absolute value of an additional worker, from whatever source, immigrant or
native. Nevertheless, large numbers of unskilled immigrants may in the long run
retard still higher potential outputs, because the inexpensive labor supply
that they provide diminishes incentives to substitute capital and improved
technology for labor, and thus inhibits productivity gains. On the other hand,
just to complicate the calculation further, insofar as the host society
continues to need a certain amount of low-skill work done, the availability of
unskilled immigrants may increase the economy's overall efficiency by freeing
significant numbers of better-educated native workers to pursue
higher-productivity employment. And overhanging all this part of the
immigration debate is the question of whose ox is gored. Low-skill immigrants
may benefit the economy as a whole, but may at the same time impose substantial
hardships on the low-skill native workers with whom they are in direct
competition for jobs and wages.

Of course, the theory that immigration subsidizes the host economy is true only
insofar as the immigrant in question is indeed a worker, a positive contributor
to the productive apparatus of the destination society. Even the crude American
immigration-control system of the nineteenth century recognized that fact, when
it barred people likely to become social dependents, such as the chronically
ill or known criminals. The issue of dependency is particularly vexatious in
the United States today for two reasons. First, the 1965 legislation contained
generous clauses providing for "family
reunification," under the terms of which
a significant portion of current immigrants are admitted not as workers but as
the spouses, children, parents, and siblings of citizens or legally resident
aliens. In 1993, a typical year, fewer than 20 percent of immigrants entered
under "employment-based" criteria.

Because of family-reunification provisions, the current immigrant population
differs from previous immigrant groups in at least two ways: it is no longer
predominantly male and, even more strikingly, it is older. The percentage of
immigrants over sixty-five exceeds the percentage of natives in that age group,
and immigrants over sixty-five are two and a half times as likely as natives to
be dependent on Supplemental
Security Income, the principal federal program
making cash payments to the indigent elderly. Newspaper accounts suggest that
some families have brought their relatives here under the family-reunification
provisions in the law expressly for the purpose of gaining access to SSI. Thus
it appears that the availability of welfare programs—programs that did not
exist a century ago—has combined with the family-reunification provisions to
create new incentives for immigration that complicate comparisons of the
economics of immigration today with that in the nineteenth century.

But on balance, though today's low-skill immigrants may not contribute as
weightily to the economy as did their European counterparts a hundred years
ago, and though some do indeed end up dependent on public assistance, as a
group they make a positive economic contribution nevertheless. It is no
accident that today's immigrants are concentrated in the richest states, among
them California (home to fully one third of the country's immigrant
population), just as those of the 1920s were. And just as in that earlier era,
immigrants are not parasitic on the "native" economy but productive
participants in it. The principal motivation for immigration remains what it
was in the past: the search for productive employment. Most immigrants come in
search of work, and most find it. Among working-age males, immigrant
labor-force-participation rates and unemployment rates are statistically
indistinguishable from those for native workers. The ancient wisdom still
holds: Ubi est pane, ibi est patria ("Where there is bread, there is my
country"). Not simply geography but also that powerful economic logic explains
why Mexico is the principal contributor of immigrants to the United States
today: the income gap between the United States and Mexico is the largest
between any two contiguous countries in the world.

One study, by the Stanford economist Clark W. Reynolds, estimated the future
labor-market characteristics and prospects for economic growth in Mexico and
the United States. For Mexico to absorb all the new potential entrants into its
own labor markets, Reynolds concluded, its economy would have to grow at the
improbably high rate of some seven percent a year. The United States, in
contrast, if its economy is to grow at a rate of three percent a year, must
find somewhere between five million and 15 million more workers than can be
supplied by domestic sources. Reynolds's conclusion was obvious: Mexico and the
United States need each other, the one to ease pressure on its employment
markets, the other to find sufficient labor to sustain acceptable levels of
economic growth. If Reynolds is right, the question with which I began—Can we
still afford to be a nation of immigrants?—may be wrongly put. The proper
question may be Can we afford not to be? (For another perspective on this
question see this month's article by George J. Borjas.)

The Reconquista

But if economic necessity requires that the United States be a nation of
immigrants into the indefinite future, as it has been for so much of its past,
some important questions remain. Neither men nor societies live by bread alone,
and present-day immigration raises historically unprecedented issues in the
cultural and political realms.

Pluralism—the variety and dispersal of the immigrant stream—made it easier
for millions of European immigrants to accommodate themselves to American
society. Today, however, one large immigrant stream is flowing into a defined
region from a single cultural, linguistic, religious, and national source:
Mexico. Mexican
immigration is concentrated heavily in the Southwest,
particularly in the two largest and most economically and politically
influential states—California and Texas. Hispanics, including Central and
South Americans but predominantly Mexicans, today compose 28 percent of the
population of Texas and about 31 percent of the population of California. More
than a million Texans and more than three million Californians were born in
Mexico. California alone holds nearly half of the Hispanic population, and well
over half of the Mexican-origin population, of the entire country.

This Hispanicization of the American Southwest is sometimes called the
Reconquista, a poetic reminder that the territory in question was, after all,
incorporated into the United States in the first place by force of arms, in the
Mexican War of the 1840s. There is a certain charm in this turn of the wheel of
history, with its reminder that in the long term the drama of armed conquest
may be less consequential than the prosaic effects of human migration and birth
rates and wage differentials. But the sobering fact is that the United States
has had no experience comparable to what is now taking shape in the
Southwest.

Mexican-Americans will have open to them possibilities closed to previous
immigrant groups. They will have sufficient coherence and critical mass in a
defined region so that, if they choose, they can preserve their distinctive
culture indefinitely. They could also eventually undertake to do what no
previous immigrant group could have dreamed of doing: challenge the existing
cultural, political, legal, commercial, and educational systems to change
fundamentally not only the language but also the very institutions in which
they do business. They could even precipitate a debate over a "special
relationship" with Mexico that would make the controversy over the North
American Free Trade Agreement look like a college bull session. In the process,
Americans could be pitched into a soul-searching redefinition of fundamental
ideas such as the meaning of citizenship and national identity.

All prognostications about these possibilities are complicated by another
circumstance that has no precedent in American immigration history: the region
of Mexican immigrant settlement in the southwestern United States is contiguous
with Mexico itself. That proximity may continuously replenish the immigrant
community, sustaining its distinctiveness and encouraging its assertiveness.
Alternatively, the nearness of Mexico may weaken the community's coherence and
limit its political and cultural clout by chronically attenuating its members'
permanence in the United States, as the accessibility of the mother country
makes for a kind of perpetual repatriation process.

In any case, there is no precedent in American history for these possibilities.
No previous immigrant group had the size and concentration and easy access to
its original culture that the Mexican immigrant group in the Southwest has
today. If we seek historical guidance, the closest example we have to hand is
in the diagonally opposite corner of the North American continent, in Quebec.
The possibility looms that in the next generation or so we will see a kind of
Chicano Quebec take shape in the American Southwest, as a group emerges with
strong cultural cohesiveness and sufficient economic and political strength to
insist on changes in the overall society's ways of organizing itself and
conducting its affairs.

Public debate over immigration has already registered this prospect, however
faintly. How else to explain the drive in Congress, and in several states, to
make English the "official" language for conducting civil business? In previous
eras no such legislative muscle was thought necessary to expedite the process
of immigrant acculturation, because alternatives to eventual acculturation were
simply unimaginable. Less certain now that the traditional incentives are
likely to do the work of assimilation, we seem bent on trying a ukase—a
ham-handed and provocative device that may prove to be the opening chapter of a
script for prolonged cultural warfare. Surely our goal should be to help our
newest immigrants, those from Mexico especially, to become as well integrated
in the larger American society as were those European "new" immigrants whom E.
A. Ross scorned but whose children's patriotism George Patton could take for
granted. To reach that goal we will have to be not only more clever than our
ancestors were but also less confrontational, more generous, and more welcoming
than our current anxieties sometimes incline us to be.

The present may echo the past, but will not replicate it. Yet the fact that
events have moved us into terra nova et incognita does not mean that history is
useless as a way of coming to grips with our situation. To the contrary, the
only way we can know with certainty as we move along time's path that we have
come to a genuinely new place is to know something of where we have been.
"What's new in the starry sky, dear Argelander?" Kaiser Wilhelm I is said to
have asked his state astronomer, to which Argelander replied, "And does Your
Majesty already know the old?" Knowing the old is the project of historical
scholarship, and only that knowledge can reliably point us toward the new. As
Lincoln also said, "As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We
must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."

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During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Since the end of World War II, the most crucial underpinning of freedom in the world has been the vigor of the advanced liberal democracies and the alliances that bound them together. Through the Cold War, the key multilateral anchors were NATO, the expanding European Union, and the U.S.-Japan security alliance. With the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO and the EU to virtually all of Central and Eastern Europe, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and secure as never before in history.

Under the shrewd and relentless assault of a resurgent Russian authoritarian state, all of this has come under strain with a speed and scope that few in the West have fully comprehended, and that puts the future of liberal democracy in the world squarely where Vladimir Putin wants it: in doubt and on the defensive.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

Modern slot machines develop an unbreakable hold on many players—some of whom wind up losing their jobs, their families, and even, as in the case of Scott Stevens, their lives.

On the morning of Monday, August 13, 2012, Scott Stevens loaded a brown hunting bag into his Jeep Grand Cherokee, then went to the master bedroom, where he hugged Stacy, his wife of 23 years. “I love you,” he told her.

Stacy thought that her husband was off to a job interview followed by an appointment with his therapist. Instead, he drove the 22 miles from their home in Steubenville, Ohio, to the Mountaineer Casino, just outside New Cumberland, West Virginia. He used the casino ATM to check his bank-account balance: $13,400. He walked across the casino floor to his favorite slot machine in the high-limit area: Triple Stars, a three-reel game that cost $10 a spin. Maybe this time it would pay out enough to save him.

A report will be shared with lawmakers before Trump’s inauguration, a top advisor said Friday.

Updated at 2:20 p.m.

President Obama asked intelligence officials to perform a “full review” of election-related hacking this week, and plans will share a report of its findings with lawmakers before he leaves office on January 20, 2017.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Eric Schultz said Friday that the investigation will reach all the way back to 2008, and will examine patterns of “malicious cyber-activity timed to election cycles.” He emphasized that the White House is not questioning the results of the November election.

Asked whether a sweeping investigation could be completed in the time left in Obama’s final term—just six weeks—Schultz replied that intelligence agencies will work quickly, because the preparing the report is “a major priority for the president of the United States.”

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.